Exit Five Newsletter: 3-Step playbook for unforgettable marketing

Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter — read by 42,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,700 other members at exitfive.com.

By the way — this email was designed in Knak, which helps you create email and landing pages in minutes without having to write code. Learn more about Knak here.

TOGETHER WITH AHREFS

💻 Track What AI (and Real People) Are Doing on Your Site

Most marketers don’t realize how much traffic they’re getting from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a lightweight analytics suite built for marketers who care about traffic, SEO, and visibility, especially in an AI-driven search world.

Here's what's inside:

• Web Analytics: see your top traffic sources, pages, and visits from AI tools
• Site Audit: catch 170+ technical SEO issues (and get help fixing them)
• Site Explorer: find out which keywords and backlinks are driving organic traffic

It’s how you stop guessing and start making decisions based on what’s really working.

And the best part? It’s free for any verified site.

📗 Become Unforgettable With This 3-Step Playbook

Mark Schaefer (author of 11 marketing books) found that 67% of B2B marketing creates zero emotional connection.

AI didn't create this problem. It's just making it worse by flooding the market with more and more forgettable content.

The good news? This creates the biggest opportunity in marketing history.

While everyone else races to optimize their ChatGPT prompts, smart marketers are doing something AI can't replicate: leaning into real connection and emotion.

Here’s exactly how to make that happen.

The 3-Part Framework To Stand Out

When everyone's using the same AI tools, winners disrupt one of three things:

1. Disrupt the Story

Liquid Death didn't sell water. They sold "murder your thirst" in tallboy cans that look like beer.

Instead of competing on purity or health benefits like every other water brand, they went completely against the grain. The result? They became the fastest growing beverage in America by telling a story no one expected.

2. Disrupt the Channel

A cybersecurity company took their impossibly complex product and turned it into a card game. Now universities and the government use it for training.

They also created a comic book that became so popular it's being licensed by distributors. They took boring B2B education and made it playful, turning compliance training into entertainment.

3. Disrupt the Storyteller

Nutter Butter cookies went from forgotten brand to 1.6M TikTok followers with fever-dream videos that have nothing to do with cookies.

These aren't polished brand videos. They're bizarre, surreal content. Sales quadrupled in 12 months because they let their brand have a personality in ways their competitors never would.

Your 90-Day Action Plan

Week 1–2: Audit your boring

• Compare your last 5 pieces of content to your top 3 competitors (if they look the same, you're invisible)
• Screenshot your LinkedIn ads next to your competitors' (can you tell them apart without logos?)
• Run the "mom test:” would your mom understand what you do and why it matters in 30 seconds?

Week 3–4: Pick your disruption

• What story could you tell that no one expects?
• What channel would shock people in your industry?
• What unexpected person could tell your story?
• Study brands outside your industry that make you stop scrolling. What are they doing differently?

Week 5–12: Run pilot programs

• Create content in a format your industry never uses (comic strips for SaaS, TikToks for manufacturing, podcasts for accounting software)
• Partner with an unexpected collaborator (B2B software company + local artist, HR platform + mystery podcast)
• Document what makes leadership nervous (that's your signal you're onto something)
• Measure "talk-ability" alongside clicks—are people actually sharing and discussing your content?

The bottom line? It’s time to stop optimizing for safe and start optimizing for memorable.

P.S. Mark’s book Audacious goes deeper into this whole framework. Know a brand that’s actually pulling it off? Reply and send it our way, we’d love to dig into it.

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

📝 [TOMORROW] How B2B Marketers Are Actually Using AI for Content

Everyone’s talking about AI. But who’s actually doing something useful with it?

This live session will feature five finalists who submitted how they’re using AI to power their content engine. Each one will take the (virtual) stage to demo their process, show results, and answer questions from our expert panel:

• Benny Bridger (Head of Marketing, Walnut)
• Jess Cook (Head of Marketing, Vector)
• Dave Gerhardt (Founder & CEO, Exit Five)

Here’s a preview of what they’re bringing to the table:

• A “content concierge” GPT trained on original research to surface stats, quotes, and data for SEO, sales decks, thought leadership, and more
• A 3D content workflow combining Meshy and VEO 3 to generate and animate characters for creative brand storytelling
• AI-generated quarterly sales briefs that merge real-time economic data with tailored messaging
• A high-volume content engine using AI to monitor trends, generate content from transcripts, and score leads based on social engagement
• A no-code ROI calculator built in Lovable that reps use to build tailored business cases live with prospects

Expect behind-the-scenes workflows, creative tools in action, and lessons you can take back to your own team.

Join Live or Get the Recording

🏢 Open Roles

Who's hiring right now?

🔥 HOT JOBS OF THE WEEK:

Directive is hiring a Demand Generation Manager to own performance marketing for a small client portfolio, run cross-channel SaaS campaigns, and drive pipeline through strategy and execution. The ideal candidate is a sharp, T-shaped marketer who thrives on client results and gets things done fast.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Opus is hiring a B2B Product Marketing, Sr. Manager
• NewtonX is hiring a Strategic Marketing Advisor
• RightRev is hiring a Marketing Manager
• Tiugo Technologies is hiring a Senior Web & Brand Designer
• Paramark is hiring a Marketing Manager
• Paramark is hiring a GTM Engineer
• Science Interactive is hiring a Producat Marketing Mangager
• Quarterzip is hiring a Senior Growth Marketing Manager

See all open roles

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it? Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 42k+ marketers.

🪪 BECOME AN EXIT FIVE MEMBER

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